To offload voice traffic off of legacy third generation (3G) wireless networks, wireless carriers have introduced the capability of carrying voice traffic over high speed fourth generation (4G) and fifth generation (5G) networks, collectively referred to as voice over long term evolution (VoLTE) as well as the capability to carry or offload voice traffic only complementary private or public 802.11-based (e.g., Wi-Fi) networks.
In some circumstances, voice call performance over any of these access network technologies may suffer performance limitations, such as those caused by indoor environments, poor signal propagation or environments that are located remotely from a suitable base station or due to, for example, radio frequency requirements associated with a particular access technology. For example, in some wireless technologies, packet loss and jitter may be caused at least in part by cell congestion, radio link failure, IP network routing delays, queueing delay, buffer overflow on UE stack, and intra & inter radio access technology handoffs.
To adequately address these potential limitations, wireless service providers must be able to accurately and predictably ascertain the quality of the voice call services offered over their networks. Unfortunately, network operators are unable to capture or otherwise analyze actual end user voice packets due to technical, privacy, and legal limitations. Further, objectively determined or monitored network element operational statistics may not fully or accurately reflect end user perceived voice quality in any easily identifiable manner.
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been used to recognize text from spoken word. In general, ASR works by converting acoustic speech signals into a sequence of fixed-size acoustic vectors called “feature extraction.”
Accordingly, a quantitative method of correlating network operational data to the actual end user perceived voice quality that leverages ASR techniques may be needed to effectively utilize available network resources to optimize voice call performance.